Future mobile applications will be more and more demanding of computing and memory resources and also will require more bandwidth for communication and shorter computation delays. An example of such an application is video recognition. At the same time, the computing and memory resources of a mobile phone remain limited by the power consumption of the phone.
The phone communication with the core network passes through the base station. This feature has led to the idea of running the application on an external server, by offloading parts of the application to servers or to base stations, where the application is executed by virtual machines. In this way is created a cloud assisting the execution of a mobile application.
Disconnecting application offloading to base stations (eNB in LTE or Access Point in 802.11 and WiFi) from user mobility management creates serious connectivity or delay problems, such that for the user the mobility is not “seamless”. The offloaded application may cease to receive input data or the user may not receive the output results.
The work leading to this invention has received partial funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 318784.